by Julia Watts
Wendy smiles and says, “Hmm.”
“Hmm what?”
“Hmm nothing, really. I just like the way you talk.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I know I don’t talk good English like the Cooks. Shoot, even the English teachers at school don’t talk good English like the Cooks.
“The way you talk is like music. The expressions you use, the stories you tell. That’s what you are, H.F.—a storyteller.”
I like that. I like it a lot, to tell the truth. I take another sip of wine and notice that Wendy’s setting down her empty glass on the nightstand. For all her talk about how you’re supposed to slosh wine around in your mouth to taste it, she’s gotten rid of hers pretty fast.
She leans back on the pillows. Her gauzy white gown blends with the gauzy netting that’s draped over the head of the bed. Her hair is a blazing halo around her face. She smiles at me, her eyes a little sleepy, her lips stained purple. Beautiful. “I’ve never met a girl like you before, H.F. Having you for a friend is like having a best girlfriend and a boyfriend at the same time.”
I guzzle the rest of my wine like Kool-Aid on a hot day. I set my glass on the table beside hers, lean forward, and close my eyes. My lips brush hers for a soft, sweet second, and then I pull away, scared that she’s mad.
But she’s not. She pulls me back toward her, and this time she kisses me. Her mouth mashes mine so our lips lock together. One of her hands snakes up the back of my neck, and every pore in my skin feels shot through with electricity. When her tongue slips between my lips, I yank myself away, breathing like I’ve just run a mile.
Wendy wrinkles her forehead. “Are you OK?”
“Yeah,” I gasp. “I’m better than OK. I’m just kinda new at this.”
“At kissing girls?”
“At kissing, period.”
“Well,” Wendy says, “I’m not new at kissing.”
“I can tell.” I lean back toward her. This time I don’t let her tongue scare me. I touch mine to it, let them slide around each other, all the time feeling like I’m gonna die from pleasure and knowing that if there’s a hell to go to for this, it’ll still be worth it.
Chapter Seven
When I wake up, Wendy’s sitting at her desk with her back turned to me. The clock on the nightstand says 6:48. I prop up on one elbow. “Do you always get up this early on Saturday mornin’?”
She jumps a little, like I scared her. “I couldn’t sleep.”
“Come back to the bed. I’ll pet you till you fall asleep.”
When Wendy turns around, her face is all blotchy and swollen up. “I can’t come back to the bed, H.F. Not while you’re still in it.”
I sit up like somebody woke me up by pouring a bucket of ice water on me. “Why not?”
Wendy looks at me like I’m the dumbest cow in the pasture. “What do you mean, why not? Do you remember what we did last night, or was that one glass of wine enough to cloud your memory?”
“Of course I remember last night. I’ll always remember it.”
Tears start spilling out of Wendy’s eyes, and she kind of gasps. “Don’t.”
“Don’t what?”
“Don’t remember it. Just forget it, OK?”
“Why?” I don’t say it, but I’m thinking, Why should I forget the best thing that’s ever happened to me?
“Because it was a mistake. I mean, my God, I’d never do what we did last night with a boy under my parents’ roof. So why did I do it with you? I mean, H.F., if you like girls, there’s nothing wrong with that, but you can’t expect me to be a...a lesbian just because that’s what you are. I don’t like girls that way.”
“You like me.”
“I like you as a friend, H.F., but that’s it. What happened last night was...I don’t know what it was. I guess I was used to having a boyfriend before I moved here, and I missed kissing and stuff, and well...you were here.”
Now I’m crying too, so I know it must be bad, because I don’t ever let people see me cry. “So, what...you were pretending I was your boyfriend back home? It wasn’t no different than practicin’ kissin’ on a pillow or somethin’?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Well, what did you say then?”
Wendy wipes her nose on the sleeve of her nightgown. “I don’t know. I don’t know what I’m saying. I’m confused, H.F.”
I look at her and know it’s me that made her feel this way. I feel horrible and pitiful at the same time, like the monster in the old movie of Frankenstein who just ends up hurting everybody he tries to love. “What can I do to make you feel better?”
Wendy looks right at me for the first time this morning. “Go,” she says.
So I go. I pull on my jeans and shoes, grab my bag, and walk out of Wendy’s room without saying a word. Thank the Lord, her parents aren’t up yet, so I tiptoe through the living room and out the front door, shutting it softly behind me.
Of course, once I’m outside, I realize something that Wendy either didn’t think about or didn’t care about: I don’t have a ride home. Not knowing what to do, I start walking. I walk through Wendy’s neighborhood, past all the pretty brick houses with their azalea bushes and flower beds, and shiny new cars in the driveways, and I know in the pit of my belly that I don’t belong here. I never belonged in Wendy Cook’s neighborhood, I never belonged in her house, and I sure as shooting never belonged in her bed.
Memaw always says there are lines you don’t cross. Back when the miners went on strike when she was living in the coal camp, the worst thing a man could do was cross the picket line. She says you don’t cross the line against working people who just want a fair wage.
But the hardest lines to remember not to cross are the lines you can’t see. You don’t cross the line from remembering where you came from to being something you’re not. And that’s what I was trying to do at Wendy’s—cross the line that separates college-educated people in fine brick homes from people like me. It was just like the yellow tape the police put up on TV shows. It said DO NOT CROSS everywhere I looked, but I crossed it anyway. And now I’m paying for my crime.
Of course, Wendy wanted to cross that line too. I felt it last night when she kissed me, when we were crushed so tight against each other, nothing could separate us. But when she woke up this morning, the line she crossed was glowing like it was made out of neon, and she had to put it between us once again. Because the line Wendy crossed isn’t just the line that keeps poor people away from rich people and ignorant people away from smart people. It’s also the line that keeps apart girls who like boys and girls like me. Lesbians. Nobody had ever called me a lesbian until Wendy did this morning, and when she said it, I felt how scared she was—scared because I was one and she might be one too.
There’s a little grocery store at the foot of the hill, and I think about digging around in my bag for money to call Bo on the pay phone. Still, I don’t think I could face him right now. I’d be too ashamed to tell him what happened. Plus, I’m too proud to look him in the face and tell him he was right—that me liking “Pippi Longstocking” was nothing but a useless crush, and nothing’s come out of it but pain for us both. I walk past the pay phone.
Downtown Morgan isn’t exactly hopping with activity. Since they built the big Wal-Mart out by the interstate, people go there to fill their prescriptions and buy their toothpaste instead of at City Drug like they used to. The Wal-Mart even has a money machine, so you don’t have to drive downtown to the bank if you need some cash. Now, on early Saturday morning, downtown Morgan looks so dead you might as well start throwing dirt on it.
There’s not a soul out, not even the old men who spend so much time sitting on the benches in front of the courthouse that I’ve wondered if they get their mail delivered there. The only other person I see is the waitress who’s come in to open up the Dixie Diner. Through the window I see her slump over a table, setting out the salt and pepper shakers and the ketchup bottles.
Her name is on the tip
of my tongue. I remember when she went to Morgan High. Just like my mom did, she got pregnant and dropped out of school. But instead of running off, she married the baby’s daddy and stayed here. Her eyes look like a dead woman’s, and even though I wish every day that my momma hadn’t left me, I also hope that wherever she is and whatever she’s doing, she’s having more fun than this poor girl.
I feel as sad thinking about the waitress as I do thinking about me. She probably just wanted to have some fun with her boyfriend one Saturday night. But she didn’t know that 15 minutes of fun would make her quit school and end up at the Dixie Diner, going home every night smelling like grease and watching the varicose veins pop out on her legs. And me...all I wanted was to act on my love for Wendy, and here I am, more alone than I ever was—and sadder because I got one delicious taste of something I can never have again.
Memaw says people who choose earthly pleasure have to pay a price for it, and I reckon I agree with her. Except that Memaw was wrong about when you pay the price. Hell don’t wait till after you die.
By the time I finally make it home, I’m dripping with sweat, and I’ve cried till my eyes are so dry I can hear them click when I blink them. If somebody was after me, all they’d have to do is follow the trail of sweat and tears.
Memaw’s at the kitchen sink, washing the skillet she fries eggs in. She jumps a little when she sees me, and I don’t blame her. I know I must look as bad as a dog’s breakfast. “Faith, where in the sam hill did you come from? I didn’t see a car pull up.”
“I walked.”
“You walked? I thought your little friend lived plum on the other side of town.”
“She does.”
“Well, for land’s sake, you could’ve called your uncle Bobby to come get you.”
“I felt like walkin’.”
“Felt like walkin’ three miles as hot as it is?” Memaw says. “You’re the quarest child I ever seen.”
Before I even think, I say, “You don’t know the half of it.” I get the jug of orange juice out of the fridge, pour a glass, and drink it in four gulps.
“You want me to fix you an egg?”
“I ate at Wendy’s.” When I say her name, the orange juice hisses in my stomach like acid.
“Huh. I never woulda thought them college types would be out of the bed so early on a Saturday mornin’. You’d think they was coal miners.”
I can’t stand to make small talk with Memaw anymore, so I say, “I stink to high heaven. I’m gonna go take me a bath.”
“All right, honey. I’ll be readin’ my Bible.”
I walk toward the bathroom, thinking I’ve escaped, but then Memaw hollers, “Did you have a good time with your little friend?”
I’m glad my back is turned so she can’t see the tears in my eyes. “It was OK.”
Chapter Eight
One time Uncle Bobby tried to talk Memaw into letting him put a shower in the bathroom, but she said she’d never took a shower before, and she didn’t see why she should start now. “A bathtub should be good enough for anybody who ain’t getting above their raising,” she said. After all, she had grown up taking her Saturday night baths in a washtub full of water that her momma had heated up on the coal stove.
In a way, I hate getting into the tub, washing off all the places Wendy touched me. Part of me would like to keep her marks on me, so I could dust myself for fingerprints and find the traces of her touch still on me.
But Wendy wants me to forget, so I sink into the water up to my shoulders, even though I know all the soap and water in the world can’t make me forget the feeling of her hands on me. The only way I could forget is to keep sinking under the water until I can’t breathe anymore.
But I can’t do that. If I killed myself, I’d be killing Memaw too. I look up at the needlepoint sampler of the Ten Commandments hanging on the bathroom wall: THOU SHALT NOT KILL.
There’s a Bible verse for every occasion in this damn house.
I grab the soap and washrag and start scrubbing myself off as hard as I can, just like when Memaw used to wash me when I was little, like she was trying to scour off the top layer of my skin.
Big tears roll down my cheeks and plop into the bathwater, and I wish I was a girl who could needlepoint Bible verses and believe them, who thought about things like matching her eye shadow to her sweaters, who wanted a boy to ask her to the junior-senior prom. It must be so easy to be a girl like that—to just naturally be what other people want you to be.
But even if I did like boys, I couldn’t be one of them girls—not the way I was raised. Girls like that are raised by two parents who planned on having them and fixed up a nursery while they giggled about the stork getting ready to come.
No stork brought me. I was pushed out between the skinny legs of a frustrated 15-year-old girl who took one look at me and turned tail and ran the first chance she got.
Those stupid, shallow, happy girls never know what it’s like to be unwanted. Not like me—unwanted by Wendy, by my own mother. There’s only been two people in my life who’ve wanted me to be a part of theirs: Bo and Memaw. And if Memaw knew all there is to know about me, I’m not sure she’d want me either.
The water is getting cold, so I pull the stopper out of the drain and just lay in the tub, feeling the water get sucked down the drain and wishing I’d get sucked down with it.
Since laying in an empty bathtub all day seems like something a crazy person would do, I finally get out and dry off. When I zip up my jeans, I snag a raggedy fingernail on the zipper and tear it to the quick. “Damn,” I say, even though I know if Memaw heard me, she’d preach me a sermon on cussing.
I look in the cabinet for the nail clippers, but they’re not there. Figures. Memaw’s bad about not putting things back where she found them. The older she gets, the more absentminded she is. One time she lost her dentures, and we finally found them in the breadbox.
She’s still reading her large-print Bible in the living room, tracing her pointer finger under the words and moving her lips just a little. “Hey, Memaw,” I holler, “where’s the nail clippers at?”
She doesn’t even look up from her reading. “I had ‘em in my room the other night.”
Memaw’s dresser has handmade doilies and baby pictures of me, Momma, and both my uncles on it. It has a jar of buttons for when you lose a button off your shirt and a plaque with a poem called “Footprints” on it, but no nail clippers. They’re not on top of her nightstand either, so I open the drawer.
I guess everybody has a drawer like the one in Memaw’s nightstand—full of loose pennies and nubby pencils and old receipts and recipes. If something small has come up missing, there’s a pretty good chance it’s in that drawer.
The nail clippers are in there, but they’re not what catches my eye.
It’s an envelope with a postmark from two weeks ago. The return address reads: Sondra Louise Simms, 520 Palmetto Dr., Tippalula, Fla. My mother.
The envelope is empty, and there’s nothing that looks like a letter anywhere in the drawer. I grab a nubby pencil and quickly copy down the address on a scrap of paper and pocket it.
Memaw promised me that if she ever heard from my momma, she’d tell me the very second she did. But whatever was in this envelope came two weeks ago, and she hasn’t said one word about it. I think of another one of the needlepointed Commandments on the bathroom wall: THOU SHALT NOT BEAR FALSE WITNESS.
Chapter Nine
“Heavenly Faith Simms, you’ve done gone and lost your mind,” Bo says. We’re sitting on a rock beside Deer Creek. As soon as I found my mother’s address, I called him and told him he had to come get me.
“Well, I’ve lost everything else. I guess my mind might as well be the next thing to go.” I take the address out of my pocket and stare at it for a minute. When I raise my head, I look Bo straight in the eye. “Let me put it to you this way, Bo. Who in this town do you trust?”
“You.”
“Me and who else?”
“Just you, but—”
“See,” I cut him off, “that’s just it. You’re the only person in this town that I trust. There for a while I thought I could trust Wendy, but you shoulda seen her this mornin’, Bo—she turned on me like a mad dog. All my life I thought I could trust Memaw, but...” I hold up the address. “Just look at this. The one thing I want more than anything else in the world, and she keeps it from me. She can say she loves Jesus till the cows come home, but not tellin’ me my momma’s been writin’ to her—that’s as bad as tellin’ me a lie right to my face.
“Ever since I wasn’t no more than a baby, that old woman’s told me it’s a sin to bear false witness. ‘Faith,’ she says to me, ‘the truth will set you free.’ Well, then, how do you explain this?”
Bo looks at the trees, at the rocks, at anything but me. “I’m sure she’s got her reasons.”
“Yeah, and I’m sure them football players has got their reasons for poundin’ your face into the pavement. Don’t you see, Bo? You and me—we’re all each other’s got in this whole damn town.”
Bo squints up his blue eyes. “I don’t think I know what you’re gettin’ at.”
I stuff the address back in my pocket for safekeeping. “What I’m gettin’ at is...with school out next week, what have we got to keep us here? What’s to stop us from just hittin’ the road and takin’ off—”
“To Tippalula, Florida?” Bo looks at me like he’s come to see me during visiting hours at the loony bin. “Lord, H.F., how many hundred miles is that from here?”
“You’re always sayin’ how you’d like to get out of this town and see the world. Well, here’s your chance. I just feel like if I could lay eyes on my momma—if she could just lay eyes on me—things would be OK. I mean, what if she’s wanted to see me for years and Memaw’s been keepin’ us apart?”
“Couldn’t you just call her or something?”